IKEA has already conquered the world—here’s how its design chief plans to engineer the future

For urban dwellers in any of the 48 countries that IKEA sells its
chic-for-the-people home furnishings at, the IKEA trip is a rite
of initiation for moving apartments. The company truly is, as the
New Yorker once described, the "invisible
designer of domestic life."

But Ikea is just getting started.

In a recent interview with Tech Insider, Ikea's design manager
Marcus Engman shared the Swedish giant's grand — and minimalistic
— plans for the future, including a twee twist on mass
manufacturing, lamps that will charge your phone, and a
futuristic kitchen table.

"Why we are here is to make everyday life better for the majority
of people," says Engman, who started with Ikea at the ripe age of
16. "That's our vision."

Here's what that will mean for the coming years:

The future is small.

"Everyone is talking about small spaces," Engman says. "When you
go deeper into the research, you can see that people actually
choose to live in small spaces, because it’s smart. It's more
energy effective, and if you look at your home and what you
really need in terms of space, you can see that 90% of the space
you have in a normal home is not used. It’s just a few square
meters that you use a lot, and some of the square meters that you
use time to time."

As a result, people are starting wonder why they need so
much space. He compares it to cars: back in the '90s, people
drove big cars, and the cool people
drove really big cars. But today, you don't look so
impressive driving a Hummer; it's cooler to drive a
Prius.

That's happening in home furnishing, too, and Ikea wants to stay
on top of the trend.

"What we’re talking about right now is what we call the 'fluid
home,'"says Engman. "Everything in one room. Thinking on an
activity basis instead of room basis, and lots of activities
occurring in the same room."

Still, he says that you want to avoid certain traps of thinking,
like assuming that having a flexible room requires some sort of
"home furnishing machinery," such as a sofa that transforms
into a table. It's hard to relate to that kind of mechanical
furniture, Engman says, because those pieces end up
having "a very technical look due to the complexity of the
construction," he says. Instead of being a really good at one
thing, they end up being a mediocre solution for lots of
things.

Instead, you go back to the basics.

The future is a table.

A table from the
Sinnerling collection.Ikea
US

"Personally, I do believe that the table is going to be
extremely important for the future," Engman says. "That’s going
to be the masterpiece of the home. It used to be, hundreds of
years ago, that was the big piece."

Then, somewhere in the 20th century, the sofa became the
centerpiece — and the couch potatoes followed.

But the table is reemerging as the furniture focus of the
home. It's one of the oldest, most versatile forms of
furnishing: You can work there, you can socialize, and in the
case of Ikea's concept kitchen, you can cook there.

The 2025 concept kitchen table is a remarkable example:
when you set ingredients on it, the table suggests other
ingredients that you can add for recipes, and what you can cook
from ingredients you already have.

Your browser does not support the video tag.
Ikea US

The table is party to another trend: people want to be more
active.

"If you look like sitting in a sofa or a lounge chair, you’re not
in an active pose, because you’re leaning back. When you sit in a
chair or a bench around a table, that’s
active," Engman says. "That informs choices
about money. If I have this money, do I put it in a sofa or a
table? I think, for the future, people will buy more tables, and
invest more actively in tables than they have done before."

The future is a jug.

Ikea US

When asked what his favorite Ikea product is, Engman laughs —
when you come out with 1600 to 2000 new products a year, you
change your favorite from time to time.

But one item is especially exciting to him:
the Sinnerlig jug, available in the US in October.

Something went awry in the production process, Engman explains,
and an uneven flow of oxygen in the furnace made all of the jugs
a bit different from one another. Rather than a single shade
of green, the pitchers came out in a gradient of bluish
greens.

Ikea had accidentally discovered a way to mass-produce
uniqueness.

"If you just buy things when they are comparable to each other,
you might not buy them by heart," Engman says. "But when objects
are differentiated, you have to make a choice. You're not just
making a logical, efficient choice, you're picking a piece that
speaks to you — one that you relate to more strongly and
therefore make a more conscious, less disposable decision about."

"Instead of saying that everything is handmade, we could do mass
production in the future in new ways," he says. "They could be
exactly the same from a functional point of view, but differ a
little bit."

The "smart" technology could be another way to give each piece of
furniture its own personality, so that the user is more
connected with the item. Smart furniture is a
frontier that Engman says Ikea is just starting to explore —
but it won't change the identity of the company.

"We want to make things for the
many people," he says. "It’s not about making techy things. Other
companies do that better. We’re not in the
electronics business, we’re in the home furnishings
business."